Bangkok--17 Jan--Manulife Asset Management
Manulife Strength-Core Long-term Equity Fund (MS-CORE LTF) was well-received by clients in 2016 due to its prolonged performance consistency.
Chaikaseam Vadhanasiripong, Chief Distribution Officer of Manulife Asset Management (Thailand) Co., Ltd. ("Manulife AM (Thailand)", said, "We would like to thank all our clients for their trust and investment in MS-CORE LTF in the past year. We would also like to express our appreciation to our strategic partners and distributors who selected MS-CORE LTFas one of the "Recommended LTFs". ."
Chaikaseam added, "MS-CORE LTFis suitable for long-term investment purpose, as it focuses on delivering consistent performance in the 1st quartile in long term rather than the highest returns among LTF peers in short term. With this investment objective, MS-CORE LTF ranked in Top 5 of LTFs which had the highest "Batting Average" or consistently outperformed benchmark (SET50 Index) over past 3 and 5 years.
MS-CORE LTF is designed as a CORE model by using a bottom-up research approach to seek 25-35 companies with attractive growth outlooks trading at inexpensive valuations relative to their growth rate, and aims to construct a well-diversified portfolio of attractive growth securities. Aligned with Manulife's investment style, our fund managers focus on "Stock Selection" to ensure that all selective stocks are the best stocks to be invested with an opportunity to generate good returns for the Fund. The fund's past performance has proven that Manulife's disciplined investment process with dynamic decision making could generate high performance consistently. The fund's annualized return for 3-year and 5-year period ended December 30, 2016 recorded at 10.00 percent and 13.19 percent per year, outperformed the annualized returns of SET50 TRI at 6.41 percent and 9.58 percent respectively."
For Thai stock market outlook, Jintana Mekintharanggur, Director, Equities, commented: "We believe the SET index has a potential sideway up to 1,600-1,650 points. Supportive factors include the rising trend of commodities and oil prices, increase in government expenditure on infrastructure projects including the construction of Bangkok's MRT Line. However, the upward trend in interest and inflation rates may cause higher volatility in fund flow and stock market movement. Therefore, investors may have to closely monitor all key countries' policies. Our favorable sectors in next 3-12 months include commerce, construction services and other sectors which have the potential of benefitting from rising commodities prices.
Chaikaseam concluded, "LTF or RMF (Retirement Mutual Fund) can gradually be invested in the beginning of the year, as opposed to investing in the end of the year. In addition, another choice is to conduct "monthly investment" for dollar-cost averaging (DCA) through Manulife Savings Plan (MSP) with minimum THB 2,000 per month on your preferred date. For more information, please call Manulife Asset Management (Thailand) on 0-2246-7650 press 2 or 0-2354-1001 or one of the selling agents or Manulife website www.manulife-asset.co.th.